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Swift Comet

Featured on July 16, 2012

Comet Swift-Tuttle blazes across the sky in this 1992 false-color image from the Spacewatch telescope in Arizona. Amateur astronomer Lewis Swift and U.S. Navy astronomer Horace Tuttle discovered the comet independently in July 1862. Later, it was discovered that the comet is the source of the Perseid meteor shower in August. The comet visits the inner solar system once every 130 years or so; its last visit was in the early 1990s. [Jim Scotti/Spacewatch]